How to Navigate the Recent Instagram Changes to Recapture Engagement

Transcription

1 How to Navigate the Recent Instagram Changes to Recapture Engagement THRIVE BY DESIGN WITH TRACY MATTHEWS You as a designer are a brand asset, and starting to think like a marketer in that way, that people want to know you and know something about your maybe outside of what you re doing as a jewelry designer. You re listening to Thrive-By-Design business marketing and lifestyle strategies for your jewelry brand to flourish and thrive. Let s get started. Welcome to the Thrive-By-Design Podcast, Episode #96. Today I m excited, as usual, because I have a really great guest on the show today back for another round talking about Instagram. We have our favorite Instagram guru here today, Melissa Camilleri of the 21-Day Instacourse and Compliment Inc. And I m excited, especially because a lot of you have been asking about all these changes that are happening with Instagram and how that s going to affect your engagement and your following and your sales and all that sort of stuff. So, I thought why not bring our favorite guru back on to talk a little bit more about some of the changes that are happening with Instagram, and to help us kind of weed through what s going on so that we can have a better idea of how we can actually navigate the recent Instagram changes to recapture engagement for Instagram handles. So, I think this is really important because a lot of you are really growing a following and creating a community on Instagram with your jewelry brand. And Melissa gives us a lot of really great advice today. This is one of the best episodes ever. So we ll dive in momentarily, but I wanted to first do an official intro for Melissa. Some of you might not know who she is or you might not have heard of her for while so I wanted to kind of bring her into the spotlight. So, Melissa Camilleri is a high school English teacher turned CEO and the Founder of Compliment Inc., a lifestyle brand that seeks to encourage, inspire

2 and educate. Though it all started off as a college scholarship fundraiser for Melissa s students, Compliment has grown to be an online destination for people seeking gifts that uplift and give back. Since founding the company in late 2011, Melissa has set aside 5% of all product sales to the Compliment Scholarship Program and has raised tens of thousands of dollars in educational funding for girls who dare to dream big and break the cycle of poverty in their families through education. Ever the teacher at heart, Melissa is the founder of the 21-Day Instacourse, helping others gain a massive exposure on Instagram on a shoestring budget and many other workshops and trainings, where she helps with the audacity to dream a little bigger, find their unique gifts and talents and spread their messages to the world. She lives and loves in Northern California with her husban and new baby boy. So, I m going to dive in. This is a really great interview you guys. It s a really great episode in general. So, listen up if you re trying to grow your social media following on Instagram and really build a brand. Before we do that, I m going to take a word from our sponsor. Today s sponsor is Halstead is one of my favorite wholesale jewelry supply companies for a lot of reasons. [3:00] And especially because like Melissa, they are doing things to give back to the jewelry community. You might have heard on Episode #94 that I interviewed Hillary Halstead Scott from the Halstead Company, and on that episode she was talking about the Halstead Grant, which is a really great opportunity for designers to jump in and get some free money for their business, work on their business plan and really get a edge ahead with mentorship and support and opportunity to get more exposure and PR for your brand through the process of applying for a grant. So we promoted this last year. We shared a lot about the grant last year because we think it s such an amazing opportunity. In fact, several of the Flourish and Thrive designers became runners up in the grant, so I think this is a really great opportunity for you to be part of this process and a great way for you to get some funding and investment into your business. So you can head on over to Make sure you sign up, or apply I should say, for this grant because it s a really amazing opportunity. Just like Melissa is giving back to people in her hood, Halstead really loves to give

3 back to the jewelry community. So I think it s a great opportunity for you to invest in your business. Alright, let s dive right in to the episode. Today I have a guest on the show. Instagram is always changing and I love from time to time to bring our resident Instagram expert, a.k.a. jewelry and lifestyle brand owner extraordinaire, Melissa Camilleri. What s up? Hi. Hi, great to have you hear. Now you just had a baby. I did. You go by Melissa Camilleri, but now you ve added your married name. So what do you want me to call you? Melissa Camilleri is fine. That s what I m keeping professionally because it s too confusing. Otherwise in all my business entity and everything is under Camilleri, so I figure I ll keep that, but my married name is (5.01 unclear). I just don t have any easy last names. Very complicated, and you just had a little boy. So cute. I did. Seven weeks old yesterday. He s a doll. So am I. When this airs he will be probably nine weeks. Oh my gosh, time flies. Time flies, it s crazy. Anyway I wanted to have you on the show because we were chatting up the other day and we were talking about the shadow ban and changes that are happening with Instagram. And who knows, by the time this airs, what new changes are going to be coming on the horizon. So I wanted to just have you on the show to talk a little bit more about how to navigate the recent Instagram changes to recapture your engagement. Yeah my pleasure. I m excited to do that. Okay cool. So first and foremost, for those of you who are just learning about you for the first time to tell us a little bit more about your journey and your

4 brands and how you became an Instagram expert. Sure. So six years ago in 2011 I started with this idea to fundraise through jewelry making for my students. So I was a high [6:00] school English and avid teacher. I was working with low income students, at risk students and they were trying to get ready for college, and I was making jewelry just for fun on the side as a hobby, like a lot of us start out doing. And just trying to sell whatever I could and set aside some proceeds for scholarship money. So word spread and I refined my brand and I ended up taking Laying the Foundation. I think it may have been in your first iteration of it. That was the huge turning point because that was in So after a year of dabbling around as a hobby an raising money for my students, the business really grew and it grew predominantly on social media because I didn t have a budget at all for marketing. So I took to Facebook. I took to Instagram, and I really put a lot of energy into Instagram truly just because I liked it. I thought it was fun and I was able to connect with people from all around the world and I started to build relationships that, and that s how we re kind of spread and I got in touch with bloggers and different people in the media. Just call it a ripple effect. I was able to leave the classroom in 2013 and took Laying the Foundation, and I really started building a brand and now I offer things other than jewelry. We have candles and clutches and notebooks and a lot of different ways to expand the brand, but we still set aside 5% of all of our proceeds just as we did in day one for a scholarship program and it helped 11 girls fund their college education over the last five years and we ve opened up the sixth annual scholarship just earlier this year, earlier in the spring. So we re getting ready to close that and give away another $3,000. That s so cool. Where do the girls typically go to school? Is it like community colleges in their area or something else? Oh no. So, one of the requirements is they go off to a four year college, just because studies show that students who enroll in a four year college right out of high school have a greater success rate of finishing. The community college dropout rate is really high. A lot of them go to (7.55 unclear) State, which is our local university, but we have girls at UCC Santa Barbara, CSU, a lot of the

5 California State schools from where I live because right now it s a local scholarship. My dream is to take it nationally. That s so cool. I love what you re doing. It s just so great. Thank you so much. I don t know if you know this, but one of the most popular episodes is Episode #17, which is one of the first episodes that you did, that we did together, or maybe it s not one of the first episodes. I feel like I interviewed you on the blog before. Episode 17, if you haven t checked it out, it s about hashtags, which kind of relates to what we re going to be talking about today. That s so awesome. I had no idea. I mean I pumped that one out because somebody will always have questions about hashtags when we re talking in Facebook groups and stuff, and so I always promote that one. I m like here, listen to this. It s everything you need to know, but things are changing like they always do on social media. So, that s why I m glad that we re back here. Yeah, so let s talk about some of these changes because the designers in our community are starting to freak out. We re getting all these (8.55 unclear) like what are you doing, my engagement is down, blah, blah. There s so many new changes. [9:00] So, break it down for us. What s happening on Instagram? Sure. So this has been swirling around for about two months now. It s called a shadow ban, and what a shadow ban essentially is is some sort of algorithmic shift that Instagram has put out that flags certain accounts for various reasons, and we ll get into those reasons in a second, and it makes your post not discoverable under certain hashtags that you re using. So, just for those who are maybe new to Instagram and the whole social media world, a hashtag is basically a digital filing system that when you post your picture and you include a hashtag, it gets filed away under that hashtag s feed and it s a great way for people to discover you that has shared interest. That Episode 17 when we talked about was a way that you could maximize your use of hashtags. Well now if somebody doesn t follow you and you have been flagged with this shadow ban, then they might not be able to discover you in that particular hashtag feed. So it sounds kind of confusing, and it is kind of confusing because all of the information that s out there right now in our minds

6 is basically anecdotal from people who are experiencing this, and Instagram has only officially given information that says don t rely on hashtags for growth, and you always want to be posting high engagement content to build your following, which is extremely big. It doesn t give us as owners a lot of things to hang on to. So, besides having a baby in the last two months, I have been doing some research on what this shadow ban and how to work around it. And what s cool is that it pretty much follows in line with everything that I ve always talked about with Instagram, which is really working hard to build relationships, to build community and to authentically engage with your followers so that you basically become algorithm proof. Algorithm proof. I want to know how to be algorithm proof. It s not 100%, but it really doesn t affect you as bad as other people who are using the gimmicky things in order to increase their following or likes or whatever. Okay, so let s talk about getting algorithm proof. I m just kidding. What are some of the tactical things that people can do to increase engagement and their reach on social media with all these changes, on Instagram in particular? Let s do Instagram in particular. I think the first and foremost your objective has to shift away from I need more likes and followers to how can I connect with the people who are following me. That simple mindset shift can really help change things for you in terms of how you re feeling about your success or your possible stalling with things like algorithm shifts on Instagram. Because if you re really looking for [12:00] connection, then you re going to celebrate wins in a very different way than if you are only looking at likes and follows because those can go up and down with the changing of the wind. That s what causes people to freak out. It s like watching those numbers so closely. So, the mindset shift is number one, really focus on connecting as your number one objective. Really easy things that you can stop doing right away to help alleviate the effects of the shadow ban is to stop using any third party apps that violate Instagram s terms of use. So, those would be any sort of apps that you use to buy followers or to buy likes, and there s no judgment if you ve done that in the past, but those accounts are being flagged. When you see your numbers go up a little bit and then down a little bit, that s because people have employed

7 a strategy that other Instagram teachers online are teaching that just always felt weird to me, which is to go and like a bunch of people s feeds in hopes that they like you back. And then once they like you back, unfollow all those people. So it s infuriating when you re watching your numbers go up and then down and then up and then down, but that s the tactic people have been promoting, and Instagram is cracking down on that. They want authentic usage. I think that s great for people like us who are really interested in connecting authentically with other users. I don t want to put any apps on blast, but I m going to. InstaGrass is one where you can buy some follows and they actually have been taken down by Instagram. They re no longer a thing. Oh really, so they re blocked. Yeah. Crowd Fire had an option to purchase some follows and comments. A few months ago you might had been seeing spammy comments that said cool pic when you just posted something like where you re burying someone. You re like, I am going to the Himalayas to find myself. Yeah, cool pic, thumbs up. Or they re like, I just buried grandma today, so sad. Yeah, and somebody is like I love your feed and you re like oh my gosh you did not even read anything that I posted. It s just so gross and you can tell it s spam, but Instagram is cracking down on that, which is awesome because it leaves room for a more authentic connection. Another thing that has been mentioned as a trigger, this is again anecdotally based on the research that people have been doing about the shadow ban, but reasons that you re account might be flagged and your engagement might be stalling is if you re reusing the same hashtags over and over. And this is actually something that I taught in my Instagram course, which I know we re going to talk about later is to save a list of 30 hashtags in your notes section on your phone so that you can just copy and paste your most tride and true researched hashtags [15:00] that are getting you the most engagement. Well they re saying now that that might be a trigger to the shadow ban. So changing up your hashtags is something that you can start doing right away to start limiting the effects of the shadow ban. And then also if you feel like oh my

8 gosh my engagement has totally stalled, it s been recommended that you just take a little break from Instagram to kind of reset things. So, if you ve been really active and really consistent and posting two times every single day, try and take 24 hours off and that usually lifts any sort of automatic flagging that has happened on your account, and you ll see an increase again. Can you repeat that? Take 24 hours off from doing. Doing anything, just take a break, an Instagram hiatus, no likes, no comments on other people s photos. Just take a break for 24 hours. Put your phone down. It s been suggested hours to lift any sort of red flags that they ve put on your account. Now, here s the weird part. You don t really know if you ve been flagged, unless you re looking at every single hashtag that you re using from an account that doesn t follow you, which to me sounds like a huge task. A lot of work. I ve got so many more important things to do in my business than do that. So, what I ve done is just taken 24 hours off and really it s because my hands have been busy with a newborn. So I m personally not seeing a ton of effects of a shadow ban on my personal account, and I think that that s probably a reason why, because I ve been taking breaks, but also I ve never used third party apps, and I have been switching up my hashtags. The next thing I want to talk about is how you can connect better and I think this is going to really help. Okay, can I ask you a question before we go there? Let s say you have a regular hashtag that you use. I use on my personal, #XMTracyM. Is that one that could be flagged in a shadow ban or no? Yes, which is really frustrating because how do you create a brand hashtag that files away all of your own picture. So you using it on a certain type of picture. So on your Tracy Matthews account, you post personal pictures of you around town in New York with your family, and I m not sure are you using that hashtag on all of your pictures or just your jewelry line? I usually use it on all my pictures, but mostly for jewelry ones. I m looking at a picture of me and my friend Clint and I didn t hashtag that. I ve been taking a lot of breaks though from Instagram. I haven t been posting that much lately, just because we ve been busy with Flourish and Thrive on our person. But I ve asked

9 Sharon if she s noticing difference in engagement because I looked the other day, I m going to look at it really quickly. While you re looking, I think that you can have certain hashtags that you use for certain types of pictures. So, if you were to use #XOTracyM, you could use it on just your jewelry pics, and if it s not being used on another pic that you post right after, then I don t think it s going to be over usage, as far as I can tell. [18:00] Again, Instagram has not given out any official word of here s what s happening and here s how you can avoid it. Again, this is all anecdotal and from a lot of people in my Instagram course Facebook group we ve been helping each other try and figure out what you can do to work around it. And so that s just something that has come up as a speculation is just not over usage of a certain couple of hashtags that are always relying on. Okay awesome. So let s talk about increasing engagement. Okay, so at our disposal on Instagram the two biggest things that we have in our favor are beautiful pictures and engaging captions. And if you look at really big accounts online, usually they re not just Instagram famous, they also have a YouTube channel and also have a huge newsletter, also huge on Facebook, but the content that they re sharing on Instagram are beautiful pictures and really engaging captions. So as a business we really have to be thinking about who our followers are, who our dream clients are and who we re trying to attract, and this is true for any kind of marketing, regardless of any sort of algorithm or any social media platform, and think about what do those followers want to see or need to hear or read in the captions. So, what is always going to be more engaging, that s going to stop somebody in their tracks is a bright, well lit styled photo, if we re talking about our products, like our jewelry. Too often I see jewelry designers hosting dark pictures from their dining room or from their studio where it s not well lit, on a dark background where you can t see the facets of the jewels or whatever and it s not really brand. And it s just almost like the photography has become an afterthought and it really can t be that way anymore. It s like we are in such a visual time in history when people are consuming content online so much that if you can t promote your jewelry in person to these dream clients and you re trying to sell online, then photography cannot be an afterthought. It has to be something that you re putting some conscious effort into and it may mean that

10 you re taking your photos on a white or light background or it could be that you re styling it on wood if that fits your brand, but it has to be well lit. So do you recommend, let s say you just take a snap and your office is super bright and it looks well lit. Can you just use the filter or lightening up on your phone to lighten it up a little bit if you don t want to set up a full on that s more of a sidebar. That s more of a photography lesson. That s okay. I mean we all have to be somewhat a photographer, unless you re going to hire on site photographer, which is super expensive. So to get the best photos, whether you re using a DSLR camera or you are taking it directly from your cellphone. I have an iphone7 and the photo quality is excellent (20.52 unclear) DSLR. I use the brightening app, I mean, the brightening function within the Instagram app. [21:00] If you go to edit your picture. I don t think filters do that good of a job bringing out details of jewelry, but there are certain apps that you for photo editing and I think one of the best is Snap Sneed. You can brighten certain areas of a photo. Instead of brightening the whole thing where something might get washed out, you can actually brighten a certain area of a photo, which I think is really great for jewelry designers if you re going to get serious about it. Oh really, Snap Sneed, okay. Yeah, and then After Light is also a good one where it gives you the option to basically do what it s called. It adds light after the fact, but you cannot have as good of substitute. You know with your apps, it s like setting up shop somewhere, even if you have to leave your office. Bring all your jewelry in a case somewhere and go where there s good lighting, you just can t substitute that for that. So that s the best option and then if you re in a pinch, then Snap Sneed or After Light are good apps to use. Snap Seed or After Light. Right, yeah. Not Afterlife. We re not talking about life here. It s just Instagram. You don t have to freak. It s not life and death. Pictures, that s a side. You have to have good quality photos. And I also hear jewelry designers

11 talking about, all I can think about is posting my jewelry and I feel like that s boring, and I don t want to post inspirational quotes so what else can I take a picture of. And so really thinking of your content in terms of how you engage your potential followers. What are they going to want to see. What are people always asking you about? When you go to a party and you say I m a jewelry designer, what are the questions that people are asking you? What s that like? What tools do you use? There s all kinds of questions that come up when you mention that you re a jewelry designer. How can you show that in photos. So Tracy one thing that I really like that you do on your jewelry Instagram is you post out your sketches. You sketch out the different designs that you might be submitting to a potential client, and you show that because it s part of your process. Process photos are awesome to share. Being a jewelry designer is a really cool job. It s not a job that everybody has, so knowing what goes into it is pretty neat. Showing pictures of your work space. To us it might seem like whatever, we re here every day, but to people in the outside world who are not jewelry designers office to have where you re dealing with fire and metal and you have to wear goggles and that s so cool. Another thing to show is a picture of you every now and then. You do that really well. Thank you. I mean, I try not to inundate the fee which is pictures of myself, especially because selfies feel kind of funny to me still, but you have to get over it because you re part of your brand. You as a designer are a brand asset. And starting to think of a marketer in that way that people want to know you [24:00] and know something about you, maybe outside of what you re doing as a jewelry designer. For example, I ve shared a couple of photos, I shared a couple of pregnancy photos because people seem to be very interested in that and now a few photos of me holding the baby, which doesn t really have anything to do with my brand specifically except for leading up to Mother s Day, it kind of worked out well. It s my first Mother s Day and it took me a really long time to get pregnant. And on that photo I kind of shared a little bit about my journey. Creating this company so that some day maybe I could spend time with the family if I was

12 ever blessed with children. I think I had a hundred comments of people really connecting and saying, thank you for sharing your story. It wasn t like hey, cool pic. It was real human interaction. Cool pic, I love your feed. Yeah, I m like jerk, I just shared a really vulnerable situation and it doesn t have to air out all of your private dirty laundry or whatever on Instagram, but think about ways to connect that the people who follow you are going to care in connecting with you about that. So, it might not be something that personal about your family but it could be even just behind the scenes of your brand and what it s like to build a brand from the ground up. I know a lot of people who that s their whole marketing strategy is just showing the day in and day out of owning a company, and they have a massive following because it s interesting to people. That s a great idea. Showing the day in and day out of running a company. I love that. The success are like, we had a great day today because we got a news spot and showing that, or today was really hard. I was working on this piece and I kept on messing it up and this is the frustration of what happens behind the scenes, but also I get to own a jewelry company and isn t that great. So, there s lots of ways that you can get creative with those kinds of photos and how we re sharing that information. I love it. Okay cool. Should we talk a little bit about captions? Yes, absolutely. I was just about to ask, what else do we need to be thinking about? So it s the perfect segue. Let s talk about captions. Okay, I m always encouraging my participants in the Instagram course about really thinking out your captions, and sometimes I know people get stuck and they re like I just don t have anything to say. So, I want you to think about how can you engage your followers by either teaching them something. This totally falls in line with showing the behind the scenes. You could say, this tool is called a such and such and I use it to do whatever. And you re educating the people who don t already know what it is that you re doing. That s engaging. It s also

13 engaging to ask people questions. One of the things I always try to talk about is think about if you are at a party, how would you start a conversation with somebody? You would ask them a question. You might share something that you have in common. You might teach them something [27:00] that they re interested in. So, all of these translate on Instagram to engage people to get them to stop in their tracks, ready your captions and look at your picture and you re kind of telling a story. It s like a microblog almost, and it gets people to interact. I think the best, if you can call it a gimmick, would be asking questions and really specific questions like where do you live, what s the weather like there today. That s a good one. If you think about when we re doing trainings or free masters classes or stuff like that, we re trying to connect people, connect with the audience because you re sitting behind a computer and basically talking to yourself, or Robin and I are talking to each other. In a certain way, unless you re having a conversation with your audience, it s just you talking at a computer. So are you talking at your phone or posting. So, that s a great idea. One of the questions that we ask is where are you from, tell us a little bit more about your jewelry business or what s the name of your business, anything that just starts the conversation. So that s a little bit of a different audience, but if you re talking to your customers, say hey let s know where you re hanging out today or where you re from. Just get to know where the people in your audience are actually hanging out. I think most of mine would be in California. Yeah, isn t that interesting. Try it. It s a cool experiment. I like posting periodically just a picture when the weather is doing something awesome, whether it s totally pouring rain or snowing. I mean, it doesn t snow where I live, or it s a bright sunny day and I m taking a walk in the park, I will say, oh my gosh, today is so beautiful. It s 90 degrees outside and I m finally in shorts. What s the weather like where you are right now. Right now is a really fun time to ask because in the early and mid stages of spring when this is airing it could be anything. And if you have international people, southern hemisphere, then the weather is completely different. Yeah for sure. It gets people to engage. So that s all you re trying to think about. The thing

14 about the Instagram algorithm, and even with Facebook, this is the same thing, Facebook owns Instagram. When people engage on your picture then your photos are going to show up in their feed the next time you post. So, even if it s just like you realize my engagement is down, think about what s going to get people talking and leaving a comment. Once you can get some comments going, then you re going to show up in more people s feed because Instagram has deemed more content relevant to your followers. So, periodically you have to just shake things up and maybe it s not all just jewelry and sales pictures. In fact, it shouldn t always be a selling picture because that s extremely boring and people don t like to be sold to 24/7. So let s talk about a combination of the types of pictures because people ask us all the time what should you be posting. You talked a little bit about this, things to post besides your jewelry, the scenes and all that stuff. I know we talk a lot about Gary V s book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. [30:00] What do you think the good combination of nurture versus sales? I mean I guess it depends on how in general, it would depend on your brand and how you ve trained up your customers, but I think that most people who are invested in learning how to actually build their jewelry brand in an authentic are interested in building up, it s not just like a discount site, it s not like Ebay. So things to post would obviously be your products, but when you re posting your products it s probably a good idea to talk about what that product is and how somebody can buy it online. So that would be your right hook. That s your sales picture. Posting pictures of your jewelry styled on people, like lifestyle shots, but it evokes a certain emotion that you want your dream clients to feel. So, I know a lot of people in the Flourish and Thrive community have a bo-ho vibe. Like a yoga, travel, bo-ho vibe. So posting pictures of just the jewelry on a table in a flat lay is good. You can do that, but also posting pictures of people in yoga clothes wearing your mala beads and doing a heel stretch, that s also good, because it giving some sort of lifestyle idea in evoking a certain emotion and kind of putting your dream client in the shoes of the person in the photo, like I want to feel like that, I want to look like that when I m wearing that jewelry. Lifestyle pictures are good. Like I said, selfies or head shots of you as a designer and giving people some information behind the scenes into your life, photos of

15 your work space. Somebody in the Flourish and Thrive community who does a really good job of this is (31.36 unclear), and she has a really unique style of jewelry, a lot of animals in her jewelry designs. She will do hyperlapse videos. She sets up a little tripod and she will videotape her doing some sort of thing where she s like making her jewelry and hyperlapse it. So put it on fast motion speed. So it shows a behind the scenes of you actually making something on video and she posts that to Instagram and those get tons of engagement. In fact, it got so much engagement, this was several months ago, but she shared with us in our Instagram community that it got so much engagement it went on the popular posts where the hashtags are. Oh really? Yeah, like videos you may be interested in. She got tons of new followers from it, but she wasn t searching for how can I get on to this popular page. She was just looking for ways to engage with her clients and it happened in that way and she was introduced to a bunch more clients that way. So, hyperlapsing videos. There s also a newer feature, I mean, it s been around for a while, where on Instagram you can post multiple pictures where you can swipe through. You know what I m talking about? Yeah. Okay, so when you post your content you can post four pictures at a time. It shows up just like one picture and then swipe and you see another picture and swipe and then another picture. So, those are really cool to use as a process shot if you didn t want to do a video. It started off [33:00] here s the beads in a pile, and then here s my stringing materials and then here s my hands making something and here s the finished product. So, that s a cool way to engage people or you can say here s this product in these four different colors, vote on your favorite color. So you re swiping for blue, swiping for red, swiping for green, something like that. So cool. That s a great idea. Yeah. You re always trying to think of photos that are going to get people to do something. So in your captions calling them to action in some way, it makes it interactive. You think about if you were going to show your jewelry in person at

16 a trunk show for example, you could ask somebody with all your jewelry laying out on the table, like which one do you like better? The sapphire, the ruby, the emerald or you can ask them that on Instagram. Absolutely. I love those kind of question things. I used to do this all the time using one of those frame apps where you could post pictures of different stones, like A, B, C or D or whatever. Totally. That was so much amazing information Melissa. My head is spinning. So many new ideas. So, I m going to stop you there because we have something really special for the audience coming up and I want to ask you about two things. The first one is that we are going to host you in a master class coming up on June 13 th. I m really excited about it. Why don t you tell us a little bit about that. Sure. It s called the Secret Instagram Caption Formula to Build Engagement and Grow Your Following. And it s all about specific types of captions that you can use that really help you engage your dream clients. So, we re going to spend a little bit of time talking about how to figure out who our dream clients are and what they want to read in your posts and then really specific, tactical ideas for writing your captions so that you are engaging them. And there may or may not be some templates even to use. Yeah, I m working on those right now. I m really excited. As a download, where you can plug in the information for your own particular business. It will give you some ideas of what you can caption your photos like. I love that because I feel like writing headlines, captions, titles, subject lines, whatever you want to call it. It s so nice to have a formula to follow and some sort of flow because it takes the guessing of what to do next, which is super cool. I m excited for this because we ve talked about the master class, but this is the first I ve heard of what is going to be covered. So I m really excited for this one. It s going to be amazing. Yeah, surprise. I m surprised often. Shocking. Tell us a little bit more about the 21 Day Insta Course as well. The 21 Day Insta Course began two years ago as an answer to a bunch of my business owner friends who were saying how on Earth are you building your brand so fast on Instagram? What are you doing? So I was sending out s

17 upon s with really long instructions and then I was like man, maybe I should make this cute and see if other people need it. So it s grown tremendously and we walk through [36:00] very actionable step-by-step instructions on how to engage people, grow your following and have a long term Instagram strategy that is going to benefit your business in the long run. In the past there are jewelry designers in there, lots of other product based businesses who have taken the course. It s lifetime access. So once you enroll once, every time an Instagram rolls out new changes or new features on the platform I update the course and you get to retake it for free again and again for as long as I m doing it. And it is just a really cool community of other people who are interested in building authentic engagement on Instagram and helping each other do the same. So it s brought together so many other small business who are supportive of each other, and it helps all of us build our business. So, my company tagline is We Rise By Lifting Others, and that s how I ve kind of shaped this Instagram community as well where everybody is learning for themselves, but everybody is also supporting one another. So, it s very tactical. It s not theoretical. I would say the majority of it is every single day there is here now go out and do this specific thing and try this specific thing. It only goes for 21 days, so it s really doable. You don t have to make a major long term commitment and it s really fun. It s a fun class. I hop into the Facebook group for collaboration and coaching and Facebook Live and really sharing additional resources with people beyond just what s in the course material. So, it s a really interactive, fun three weeks together. It s an amazing course. I ve taken it several times. Couple times, just repeated it. We used it to grow our Flourish and Thrive Instagram following to over 17,000 followers now. We just crossed the 17,000 mark. And I ve used the same principles to grow my personal Instagram following for my jewelry brand. I haven t been as good keeping up with Instagram lately, but this is inspiring me to do more. So, what I can say about what Melissa does though is that she s number one, one of the most amazing teachers I ve ever encountered. Everything that she delivers is really straightforward so it s easy to understand and easy to implement. And we love her so much that she s also one of the mentors in our

18 Diamond Insiders. So you can check out the Insta Course by going over to Melissa, thank you so much for being here. And we ll have everything that you need to register for the master class and to check out the 21 Day Insta Course over at the blog post for this podcast at Melissa, thank you. Thank you Tracy. Thank you so much for listening today. I hope you enjoyed the show. It was so fun bringing it to you. Once again, if you enjoyed what you re listening to, make sure that you check out our sponsor. You can head on over to You can also check out everything that we talked about on Melissa s podcast, including the free master class that s happening on June 13 th and also her opportunity for the 21 Day Insta Course. Thanks so much again. Have a great day.